Attention is all you have
alicegg.tech
alicegg.tech
We then got a bookmark system that was every bit as terrible as a web directory.
It stayed that way. The delicious search revenue made organizing websites uninteresting. That obscure website you enjoyed a decade ago but don't even remember, they had lots of traffic like you. No point updating or keeping it online. You can't have rss in Firefox but here is a Facebook like button in your address bar in stead.
I've tried to maintain the bookmark menu but I rarely use it since everything is dead. Why aren't browsers storing a text version of the bookmark? Did people in 1993 have more resources than us? Should I be afraid it grows to a few GB over the decades?
A good few dead websites have a backup some place but there is no automation to find it. If you had a string of text from a page you might be able to search for it. If the page found is highly similar we might automate the process to have alternative location for bookmarks with a nice warning dialog.
A whole different world from posts vanishing into the social media memory hole.
Instead we turned it into a worse version of television, where you still only consume passively what is fed to you while being watched and analysed.
We see that over and over again, in a bunch of non-tech fields. My kids never want to clean up their toys; they will pull out new ones, but it is a struggle to get them into the habit of putting the old ones away first. My parents used to keep a notebook with every gas fill-up they made; nobody born after about 1990 does that anymore. We were taught how to balance a checkbook in elementary school; basically nobody does that anymore, we put everything on autopay and if you are diligent you check a statement or import it into Quicken once a month (most people don't even do that, they have no idea what they are spending and predictably, usually no money left over). GMail succeeded because instead of putting your mail in folders, you just leave it in one lump with Google and rely on full-text search. A lot of Zoomer computer users don't even know what files and folders are, they just use apps, which take them straight to what they want to do and don't offer things like possession of your own data.
Back in the (~early 2010s) days when Google still allowed internal innovation, there were recurrent demos produced by engineers of full-text search over your web history, though of course it was your web history as stored by Google and none of this was local. It never became a product, largely because users are too lazy to go to a separate search product just for your history, or because they're too lazy to check a separate box saying "Search my history". Instead I think web history became a ranking input to general search and it would mix in results that you frequently visited to the general results, which honestly I think was a more useful approach.
Nowadays a lot of this is recoverable from your credit card statements (though again, I don't know anybody who actually does this), but in the 80s you would usually pay cash for gas.
I do actually audit each transaction in my card statements each month to look briefly at the categories of spending I use most. Gas is a category, but that number doesn't really change my behavior. It's just a data point.
Back in the 1930s the book was probably useful because changes in mpg were a sign you needed to do a tuneup early. But back then everybody knew a tuneup was every few months and once in a while something went off in between. Cars are a lot more reliable.
2. keeping receipts ensures that if there is a problem and your engine is damaged, then you can show where you bought the fuel, oil or component and get recompense. This is rare but does happen and it can be a costly repair. Examples are:
- bad gasoline - usually debris or water. Can stop fuel flow and cost you replacement of a gas filter at the least.
- incorrect oil change - you pay for an oil change but they don't put on a new oil filter or they add the wrong kind of oil or they add too little oil or they add too much oil. Don't discount the last one: too much oil can damage some engines seriously. I once had a dealer change my car's oil. Prior to service I explicitly warned the mechanic that the engine was a rare model and required less oil than most. Nonetheless he overfilled it. Luckily I spotted the difference immediately b/c the engine ran like shite right out of the garage. I made a freeway U-turn,drove back in, re-explained the car's needs and insisted they drain off the overfill and let me check it. The mechanic tried to cover his ass by treating it as another "crazy customer" but I just told his companions that a) he'd fucked up and b) I had specifically warned him about the problem earlier so c) they'd better keep an eye on him - he wasn't as good as they were.
3. If you sell a car, buyers love getting the records proving that you bought good oil/gas, performed maintenance, etc. FWIW most buyers do not continue to maintain such records in my experience.
I don't maintain a log book and I know only one person who does. But I file receipts for gas, parts, fluids, filters and major maintenance for each vehicle.
It might appear that all this is good reason to buy an EV but you've got the same problems as do ICUs. Suppose you pull into a facility in Kansas for a recharge as a thunderstorm rolls in. While you're eating lunch the facility is struck by lightning and the transient currents fry one or more parts on you EV. The recharge station is unlikely to be willing to pay your repairs unless you have proof you were there during a malfunction.
But it's also important to not let fanboyism cloud judgment. Tesla has great software.
2. MPG tracking by brand -- I get about 1.5 MPG better with BP.
They put precisely zero effort into killing bookmarks. I know because I was there, and probably would've been tasked with doing it. Well, that and because bookmarks still exist and I can still use them. They also put zero effort into improving bookmarks or making them easier for you to use, but it's death by inaction and consumer choice, not by anything Google did.
But on the commercial incentives, it does make sense for them to kill it.
Companies pay good advertisement so they show up first on the search result when a user want to find them.
Eg you want to go to carglass website: you type carglass in google and the company will most likely pay Google to show up first in the ads section because competitors are trying to sway away customers from them. If they didn’t outbid their competitors, even though the customer want to go to carglass, he will click on first result and may end up buying from their competitor without even noticing.
That wouldn’t happen if people had put carglass.com website in bookmark.
Search for [carglass], no ads. Search for [facebook], no ads. Search for [spotify], no ads. Search for [american airlines], no ads. All of these would be very desirable queries to advertise a competitor on.
(IIRC they've gone back and forth on this depending on what the lawyers thought they could get away with; ISTR when Bing launched Microsoft would run ads on [google] that pointed to Bing. It's been a long time since I've seen an ad on a navigational query though.)
I just tried this query on chrome / android.
This is the first link on the page at the very top:
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve
(The product page)
The next site listed was Wikipedia.
I don't have any adblockers. I am in the US.
When people tell me this stuff about their Google searches it drives me insane, I want to know why our experiences are so different. It is regional? Is it OS, is it browser, is it something else? I want to know!
Of course.
But these results don't seem to change on a degoogled chromium on desktop, with no google account login personalization, no account logged in, in incognito, using: Ublock origin lite, User Agent / OS Randomizer, Privacy Badger, and using a VPN to other locales.
That's why I want to know, I've been curious about this for years, and nothing I've looked at seems conclusive.
My biggest guess is country or native language, but it's been hard to pin down. I think that may be the biggest factor (with local laws contributing maybe to how search results get displayed).
I'm curious! I want to know the driver behind the bad experiences people are having with it. (I've been using it literally since it was released.)
If so, you may not be aware that the locations represented by square dots on the map are ads.
Which explains why they push an AI Summary to the top of most searches which discourages clicking on any of the search results.
Or not.
AI summary seems like the same play, even if it hurts their current ad business some. After all why search for stuff when a chatbot can just tell you? Makes sense they'd view it as an existential crisis and push their AI.
Google will be well positioned when ads start being added to AI for most users.
With my normie setup (logged in account, granted location permissions, no PiHole, no particular anti-tracker mechanisms beyond classic ad blocking), I get decent local results on Google, in contrast to basically any other "privacy focused" search engine.
Chat GPT and Claude seem to be struggling a lot more. I suspect this is because OpenAI and Anthropic aren't talking to the local companies here, and they may have some robots.txt shenanigans going on.
I’m somewhat in-between of two extremes, but in grand scheme of things I don’t really care, as I have completely different priorities in life. Convenience services enable me to focus on those priorities, and I don’t really care about all other stuff to a specific degree.
I’ve been lucky enough to see how people from every walk of life interact with the Internet, and realized the way I function is extremely different. To them, I am the “flat earth weirdo and do stuff differently than the others”.
To give another example - I’m expecting people in HN type about 100 words per minute on average because of our general exposure to coding, typing, internet and etc. That puts us to 99th percentile. Average person does not live like us, nor cares about it.
such as? maybe I am missing something, but I find this "this big outcome is due to some engineered effort" applied to this specific case to be inaccurate as I was there and I remember.
Crazy times.
Hotmail was great 20+ years ago. Now, it's junk and I only send junk its way.
Yes, as kids probably always did since the invention of the children's room. The usual solution was to educate - and push - them until they hopefully started to understand the benefits that an orderly room can give you and maybe even had some fun thinking of a good ordering scheme by themselves.
Only in tech would the response to kids being too lazy to clean up their rooms be "oh well obviously keeping your stuff in order is an unworkable strategy".
I remember that, back when we were in school, we would actually spend a lot of time structuring the bookmark folder, making elaborate menu hierarchies. Doing this the first time was fun.
The problem was, this lasted about until the first time the PC had to be reinstalled or someone switched the browser or something else caused the bookmarks menu to be lost. Redoing all that stuff after it got wiped was much more of a chore than doing it initially.
But this would be my takeaway here: If software developers want their users to manage their own ordering schemes or use customization features, make it easy and convenient to do - and for the love of everything, threat the resulting bookmark trees, settings files etc as critical data that has to be synced, backed-up etc. If it has to be redone after a few updates or a crash, then no one will use it.
(Incidentally, tech companies have absolutely no problem "educating" their users if the behavior is something they care about. I'm pretty sure, no product or marketing person ever said "oh well, it sure would be nice if all our users made accounts or installed our app, but they're far too lazy for that, so that's a nonstarter...")
This is akin to telling parents that if they want to their children to clean their rooms, you should make it easy and convenient to do. Obviously this is non-sensical: if you make a mess it might be hard and inconvenient work. Thats why kids don't do it!
I find some tech criticisms to be simply inane; the tech companies are not going to absorb the costs of educating users or fixing unworkable strategies. Not because Bezos needs to buy another yacht, but because the companies that try to do that all die before they get big. There is a giant graveyard of startups who have tried to be the "responsible and patient parent", and they have all died. Users don't want to put up with it, and if given the option will run to the company that just handles everything for them with a subscription fee or reselling their data.
Doing exactly that, by coming in and helping them with it (initially doing most of the work) as they get into the habit if it being a regular task, actually seems to work pretty well (at least, in the n=1 experiment conducted with my son).
Not sure what the basis for “obviously non-sensical” is, other than the (very common) fetishization of struggle.
Volume makes all the difference. If you could only visit sites you bookmarked first and you had only say 200 bookmark limit, you’d keep your bookmarks in perfect order.
That’s an occupant completely ridiculous proposition in 2024; in 2027 you’ll only need to bookmark the AI chatbot services you pay for, because the rest of the internet will become completely unusable by humans.
Then you could never actually visit any sites to bookmark them in the first place, rendering maintaining your list of bookmarks a trivial exercise.
What tech companies understand well is that if a competitor takes away people's pain and you don't, people will use that competitor.
It was technically possible to copy mp3s one by one to a USB mp3 player, and many people did if they had no other options, but marking an artist in iTunes for sync was a lot easier, so consumers preferred iPods. And managing syncing and purchasing itself was a chore, which Spotify proved was entirely unnecessary to the music listening experience for most people.
Sure, there's a small but loud minority for whom the process of purchasing / organizing music itself is enjoyable, and that minority will often try to push their views on everybody else, but the majority of the population wants a "magic box" where they can type "Taylor Swift" and get Taylor Swift music to play. Or they just want "radio, but without the battery drain, commercials, useless yapping and inability to skip songs they don't like."
I only use it to bookmark it into the database so I can search it up later.
Firefox had a tool partnership with an app that did exactly this, but unfortunately it was put in the grave last year (now I know why).
Isn’t it more optimal, from the perspective of play, to have them spread out?
I can see the argument that if you clear your desk, you’ll be more inclined to draw because you have the space. But if I didn’t impose that value, they wouldn’t necessarily draw. They’d just play with something else.
I don’t track my fuel usage. I did once. Economically, I don’t need to. The car tells me my MPG anyway, literally, if I care to look.
Accounts are harder to track now, with fewer physical assets and more renting and subscriptions.
The point you make seems to be that rigidity in the system would bring value. But I think the values people have often exist outside the system. The system is imposing an idea of what is worth tracking or organising in the first place.
Oddly, I think LLMs are quite intentional in their current incarnation. You start with an empty input box, state a curiosity, and go looking for information. There’s very little imposed structure around what you should care about.
That changes once OpenAI et al. start tracking what you do and recommending what you should be looking at before you’ve even formed the intention yourself.
There are whole studies and philosophies on work/play. The one here answering your question is the 'Work Cycle' and the step 'Return Work'.
Haha, mine too! I guess it was to calculate the fuel efficiency, which is often done automatically now.
Now I have LLMs build me tiny apps that let me upload docs and images with local processing and human verification.
My OCD is finally satiated
The real world solves it too btw. in the same way a relational database did: Indexes ;) Tagging is nothing but different indexes of the same underlying thing. Be it a book or an email or whatever else.
And this top level comment is actually weird to me. Maybe I'm just a non-Chrome-user? I use Firefox. I never bookmark anything any longer. I literally just know what to type to get to what I need to from the history. Like HN. I literally just type n into a new tab and HN is the first suggestion based on how often/recently I went here. No manual bookmarking or anything non-local needed.
Similarly at work I just know how to find certain things by typing into the search bar. And it even learns from recency. Our app URLs recently changed and I had to start typing the new unique parts of the URL recently for a few tries until it went up in the recency bias calculation. Sure like I had to scroll down a few entries in the history search a few times. Now I just know what to type to get where I want to again.
I see others struggle with rigid bookmark structures that they can't find anything in like ever on the regular though (URL change or not) :( And (at least with firefox) those bookmarks would even get searched too! Of course, unlike history they would have to manually update bookmarks. I really don't get it how people even still use bookmarks any longer.
I like the concept of indices but a lot of indices i see (like in textbooks) are incomplete. I have to think "ok what might be related to this?" And it certainly is not an easy problem!
Bookmarks are folder structure. Theoretically you can bookmark the same thing under a different part of the structure of course. I've never really seen people do that though, except accidentally because they found something the liked, bookmarked it in on place, later found it again, didn't remember they already bookmarked it and bookmarked it in a different part of their folder structure. In a way they also "tagged" except that the actual bookmark, the thing is not the same. It's a copy. If your bookmark goes to some address that might change while pointing to the same actual thing, you'd now have to update (and first find) a multitude of bookmarks in your folder structure. A file system that has hardlinks could implement "tagging" too :)
The tech was cool, but I think they ran into the issue you just suggested - people dont really bookmark, and it was hard to make people see it as anything other than a bookmarking tool with categorization.
I need to find the LLM tool that "cleans my room" for me by rearranging my 20+ year old dir layout that just keeps growing.
However we've now got local AI to do it for us:
Yes, and that's IMO perfectly understandable. What was that greeting card text? "A clean apartment is a sign of a wasted life."
Not from the US, we didn't have "balancing the checkbook" over here, but watching my parents and grandparents, and trying to mimic them growing up, I have a distinct impression that all that bookkeeping - from budgeting to gas refills to blood pressure measuerments (which my grandfather did diligently in his final decade of life) - was done as much of immediate necessity as it was of habit.
People did their book-keeping by hand because there was no external authoritative source to track it for them, but also because they needed to know - there were consequences for not knowing some numbers or their history on-demand. As soon as either becomes false, people stop. Very few people I know "keep books" for their individual spending - and it's not because auto-pay, it's because the bank gives you that information for free, effortlessly, in near real-time. The bank is now the authoritative source of how much money you have.
(That's the "external authoritative source". Auto-pay is a masssive QoL improver, but it's a consequence, not cause. The cause here is achieving "not really needing to know" by keeping your earnings higher than spendings. Then you literally don't need to care about money day-to-day, and only check balance when you're planning larger purchases - and only then, manually paying bills becomes "a sign of a wasted life".)
> A lot of Zoomer computer users don't even know what files and folders are, they just use apps, which take them straight to what they want to do and don't offer things like possession of your own data.
That's a problem - but zooming out a bit, back to "bookmarks", the problem is that sometimes you need to do some book-keeping yourself - you may have your own reasons to need to know, and there is no authority other than you. Unfortunately, it turns out, modern software is then useless, because it doesn't stop at not requiring users to keep things tidy - it purposefully doesn't ship the necessary tools and affordances to keep things tidy.
In either cases while you can reify your organizational system into files and folders it's just inferior to a personal classification system.
> Music ks a good example. Most people want to organize by album, artist, year, genre, or song title.
I assumed this is because that's what software is limited to, and people cope, and the only people who really organize like that were the record stores owners. Because personally, this in no way even resembling how I think of my music collection, or how I pick what to listen to.
For me it's usually by theme, personal "feels like they belong together" connection, causal relationships (e.g. music from the same trip I went to in high school), or artist but defined loosely, I.e. tolerant of the fact that artists collaborate and perform together.
> I like to order my photos by outing or by subject.
Outing, yes, but by-subject is alien to me. Most of my photos have exactly zero people, or anywhere from 2 to 20+. Single subject photos are oddity, and I rarely feel the need to organize by them. Events, then by date, then maybe by location.
In both cases search turns out to be the answer, but with photos it's phenomenally unreliable due to vendor fucking with or stripping metadata.
> Outing, yes, but by-subject is alien to me.
Hah seeing other photographers' Lightroom tags is always a trip. I know folks that even organize by exposure stops since they're after a certain look.
For Office-style documents, there's no better way (except for search and recents), because everybody has different needs and deals with very different kinds of documents. For things that are more standardized, like music or photos, people want to think in terms of artists, albums and playlists, not in terms of some meticulously-maintained folder hierarchy.
Folders have some nifty properties, like good deletion handling, permissions management and intuitive movement from and to different drives, but they don't outweigh the advantage of specialized entities for most people.
Most people don't have a problem with files. You learn what a file is in your first computer class day and you're done with it.
Files are not just about organization, primarily, they are the fundamental unit of information. They decouple data storage from processing, transformation, and transfer. It's how we give physicality to information. They give the user freedom in multiple ways:
- Freedom to open the file with whatever program I want, allowing me to experience it however (with a player), but also to create derivative works (in an editor).
- Freedom to store the file wherever I want, both locally or remotely.
- Freedom to share the files with others, via whatever mechanism I want.
Without files, computing is just about individual consumption. You don't own anything. That song you bought? You don't own it, it's some kind of abstract entity in Apple Music. The only thing you can do with it is press play. Living in an OS without files is like living in an universe where everything is liquid and containers of any kind are forbidden, all you can do is open the tap and drink straight from the stream.
Even if you create something? It's locked in some kind of vacuum that Apple controls. Wanna back it up? Pay Apple for Apple cloud. Wanna share it with someone? Figure it out, probably step one is to ask them to buy an Apple device.
I laugh whenever people say that Apple is "easier". The contortions I've seen people do just to get stuff from one device to another even within their own ecosystem.
The tragedy of all of this is that people that live in mobile are becoming less capable with technology over time. People talk of "the digital native" generation but kids these days know way less capable with machines than their parents. It used to be that everyone and their cousin knew how to use a P2P program, to burn a CD, to use external drives. Now you ask someone to send you some trip pictures and they'll just WhatsApp them to you. If you ask them to send you the high res originals they look at you with amazement: files? formats? compression? what's that???
Spotlight tried but didn't seem to get very far, and after the mobile revolution, nobody else could due to all the sandboxing.
I guess the fact that it's very easy to search the open web (and very hard to search things behind login walls efficiently) is also a partial cause.
Pairs up with my EU and Revolut bank perfectly, auto imports transactions, most of which you can set rules that auto assign to categories. And as they said 90% is automated, I just categorize a few transactions a week manually.
I tried something like envelope budgeting before in excel but didn't work really since I was lazy to manually add transactions, this is much easier. Budegting for a house and a USA trip without worries now :)
The system isn't perfect but, in my experience, it works 90% of the time. The remaining 10% requires manual categorisation. I suppose it also depends on how simple or complex your budget and your spending are.
Am I going to scroll through and find it later? Barely functions with text search due to only minimal metadata (maybe a title).
Worse still, I used to use bookmarks for things I wanted to return to, but now they're all dead links pretty much.. so now I have to go through and get disappointed because something interesting has now gone.
Total waste of time.
- a flat list of items, then you want - folders (or categories), beyond that you want - tag clouds, beyond those you want - keyword and strong search, beyond that you want - natural language queries.
Or any combination of those.
(There are more ways to organize/sort but I either don't know where to put them or they serve a specific type of data. I like the file system representation where each file and folder is a box the size of its size.)
Doing some of it by hand allows a workshop with more tools while preserving sanity.
The actual goal is actually really simple. There clearly is an agenda to get rid of any and all user generated media asap. Anything that works in the opposite direction will help reclaim the users executive function.
When creating a software or other products I always jokingly ask myself what kind of people I want to target and what I want to make them into. The joke is the limited room.
Building your own library should obviously be more awesome than borrowing. It might take the user a decade to see it but when they are old those child hood activities are a joy to be reminded of.
I relied on that a lot until one day a random system update deleted all my old browsing history.
- Local go server to index everything into sqlite or postgres
- browser extension to send the DOM for indexing.
- This happens after each page is finished rendering, so client side rendering doesn't break, and it doesn't require fetching the url a second time on the back-end.
- Filter rules to control what gets indexed (basic url regex patterns, nothing too fancy)
- Text-based query interface for terminal dwellers like me.
- Local file indexing that actually works well so that you can search your history and your documents in one place.
- Custom extractors for understanding specific sites and file formats.
The earlier CERN, later W3C, LineMode browser, named "www", also kept a full text history by default
Each website gets a separate folder, e.g., "308" in the example below
An .index file contains a log of all requested URLs with timestamps
/tmp/w3c-cache/.index
/tmp/w3c-cache/308/temp_lbAfil
/tmp/w3c-cache/308/temp_lbAfil.meta
grep -r whatever /tmp/w3c-cache
I use the W3C programs to retrieve HTML but not to view it. For reading HTML I use a contemporary text-only browser
"www" is a 671.0K static binary for me
I'm a text-only browser user for 30+ years so I'm probably biased in favor of text. I routinely save HTML pages from webites I find useful, almost always as plain text. No resources. This makes sesnse for me because plain text is how I search and consume information. Firefox and other popular browsers generally do not save pages as plain text, they have always attempted to save as HTML along with page resources. But I'm not interested in images, fonts, CSS, Javascript, etc. Today I notice some people writing headlless browsers, like h5i, now output pages as markdown or some "machine-readable" format
*websites
For example,
Neither Firefox or Vivaldi on Android has an option to save pages, only to print them to PDF
Saving can be achieved in these graphical browsers, e.g., through intents ("share"), but this requires other apps
Look at the commands offered in a "web browser" in 1991-1993
https://web.archive.org/web/20240205003557if_/https://www.w3...
I do get that for some people it's about research and collecting documents. For me it's basically "quick access to the most recent version of the thing at this URL"
There was always this curve where a forum would be fun because it was a small group of likeminded individuals. And as it got larger, more trolls came in, more newbies with different interests, and others that might not have shared the same cultural mentality that started that forum. And the forum would begin to shed its original members who draw the crowd. Then what’s left is people who have less interest in the community spirit. And that forum starts to shrink again as more people become disinterested and more infighting happens.
Good moderation can help but nonetheless I’ve seen this happen across dozens of forums. In IRC channels, newsgroups and so on too. So it’s not even a phenomena specific to HTTP message boards. Some communities even have a terms for it like “the eternal September”.
To be clear, this is a separate problem to the addictive design of modern platforms. That’s a whole other level negativity. But people seem to forget that the internet could be a cesspit even before Zuckerberg poisoned the well.
/s
When I have experimented with banning these sites, I have felt a positive boost in my mental wellbeing, where I go back to being bored, which is great and leads to me doing more focused activities like reading more. I just don't know how to solve the "head in the sand" issue. This site has legitimately helped me in my career for example. I think I will land on a middle ground somewhere will be the ultimate answer, like catching up once per week or something.
Likewise with Reddit you can append .rss to get a feed
If you are only exposed to points of view that you already agree with, over time it's easy to forget that some people have other points of view (which are actually not always completely ridiculous, despite what you may have heard). Note that rage bait does not count as a divergent point of view; it's almost always a cherry-picked caricature, not anything close to a good faith representation.
This might not sound like such a big deal, but do that for billions of individuals and you have the perfect recipe for the political polarization we are currently enjoying.
The sort of national unity that we took for granted between 1945-1995 (and to some extent from 1920-1945) was explicitly manufactured by mass media. Here technology presented the same content to all people, because it was cheaper to do it that way. Before the invention of consumer radios in 1920, we had a similar political polarization as we do today, if not even moreso. Also the Federal government was significantly weaker, lacking even powers like direct taxation, let alone the mass surveillance it has now.
I'd argue it's not so much a choice by the individual in that the individual often isn't consciously aware and may actually choose to use the same thing without the algorithm that pushes them towards things such as bubbles if that were even a clearly presented option.
Calling it a dumpster fire would be an insult to dumpsters.
Sounds like a personal problem if your friends are going around causing dumpster fires.
I'm not the one bragging on social media how I don't use social media. I'm not the dense one here.
Focusing your attention on things that matter is a good skill to have. Even if you only succeed part of your time, it's better than nothing.
In some areas of life, technology and society have forced us to be more aware, of more things, more of the time. Our 'context' is filled with more things to consider, and attention is the window in. Sleep, schedule, and planning, helps to reset us and use context wisely.
Modern life forces a lot of context in, but we still have a lot of control over the rest of our daily 'attention windows' (like cutting out the excessive attention-grabbing media). It's kind of a rigid way to think, but there seems to be something there. We do have a saying afterall: 'what's on your mind?'
I appreciated the article: it was a good reminder to manage time wisely.
I thought people at work would be mad, but everybody adjusted instantly.
Next up I'd like to pre-plan blocks of focused work - an idea I got from the Deep Work book.
2. Life at the speed of play by Mark Pincus
3. The Antidote by Oliver Burkeman
4. Autobiography of a Yogi by Pramahansa Yogananda
- in bulk, it creates distorted view of reality, by overemphasizing dramatic events;
- individually, approximately half the headlines are bald-faced lies, and the other half merely click bait
- articles usually correct the lies in headlines, but in every case I could independently verify, the text was presenting heavily distorted view of the events
Some of that can be canceled out by following multiple independent sources, but frankly, doing that is IMO one of the biggest ways to waste your life I can think of. Not worth the effort. Meme sites have similar ROI, and are much more fun.
- Does this affect me in any way?
- Was this my fault?
- Can I do anything to change this?
I can't see why I should care about any event that doesn't meet a single one of these criteria, yet when I look at the front page of any news site barely any story passes this test
spreading awareness is a thing. A lot of people don't know what our politicians are doing to us which gives them even more freedom to do even worse, self-serving things.
You seem extremely active on HN, so this story sounds pretty exaggerated.
Thanks for demonstrating.
I don't think it's pedantic to have a bit of self awareness, although engaging in the discussion instead of writing a pithy one liner would be better.
I think HN is good, BTW.
And one other even more important difference is that Y Combinator does not make money from HN and so have very different incentives than Facebook.
Everyone being served the same algorithmic results is a genuine technical difference (I believe; do we actually know that HN doesn't customise the front page for logged-in users?). I think it's quite a fine distinction, though -- both sites are trying to hold the user's attention, one just omits to use an available level of customisation. I have no moral objection to either approach.
It feels very healthy how I can choose what to engage with, and what to ignore.
talking about doomscrolling and how it would be better not to do it is one of the favourite pastimes of the doomscroller. loads of fb users hate it but struggle to believe they could do without it.
I'm glad Facebook told me about my classmate Eddie's death. We would never be friends but we knew each other and my life was better for having him in a class years ago. My only other chance is hope that it is discussed at a class reunion in a few years.
However Facebook wants to give me the 'you won't believe who is harming our children' overblown scare because that is what sells. I need to cut that garbage out of my life (others have discussed why in detail). Realistically Facebook has about five minutes of useful stuff per day, which doesn't make them money. However now I'm out so they get less.
Then one day out of the blue it decided to serve me straight up white nationalist content out of the blue. It only happened for a day but the fact that it happened at all is horrifying when you think about that occurring on a global scale.
Now I only open maybe once a week for a minute to check messenger and I hope soon to be able to delete the app of my phone for good. I really worry about what we've unleashed on the world letting these billionaires capture our digital commons.
I gave up on facebook when it decided I wanted to see borderline child porn (the girl was wearing a diaper and positioned as if about to nurse from the topless mom - it might not meet the definition of child porn but it obviously trying to sit just above that line). When reported I was told the group is fine by Facebook's standards. But it isn't fine by mine.
Sadly as an indie (or frankly anyone these days?) if you don’t have a social media following, you simply don’t exist. Distribution is one of - if not the most - important things to have, so farming social media is unavoidable. The worst part is that you can’t just post and go, these apps (and respective algorithms) expect you to use them regularly for your content to be shown to people.
Automating all of that is also super tricky since there are a billion bots out there. And the alternative being pay-to-win with expensive advertising.
I've also tried to stay away from the news. I have a very long list of uBlock Origin filters [2] to hide certain words and topics on Reddit (even if its politically tangent, it gets blocked), and it works amazingly well. I hate that I have to go to such lengths to avoid the worst of the internet, but I love the freedom of mind I've gained, like really it feels liberating instead of boring.
One last thing: I've started to notice that the corporate claws are no longer in my head. On the train, I see something like 50–70% of people scrolling through algorithmically curated feeds, and I think about how much influence Zuck and company have over what so many people see and think, with almost no effort. The thing is, I feel like the "old man yells at cloud" meme, like I am the crazy person doing crazy things, but I feel better this way, so I will keep doing it.
[1]: https://blog.benjaopazoc.cl/2026/09/social-media-is-ridiculo...
Of course, I still use task managers, calendars, and notes apps, and they’re useful in their own ways. But physically writing a day list with pen and paper reliably keeps me on track. If I start to drift, I look back at the list and it brings me back.
Your mileage may vary.
It's honestly very refreshing to have stuff I self-host and be operational without needing 24/7 Internet connection.
I'm running such a setup since years and, IMO, it helps me focus.
I remember thinking about how different that workflow is but it must be incredibly productive. Everything would be lightning fast (even stable Internet isn't always snappy and sometimes it's a chore) and there would basically be zero inline ads or any context switches.
> "I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it."
100% agree, and this is exactly why I disable any sort of algorithmic recommendations on the platforms I’m active on. I do this either through the app itself or by using those platforms on the web and hiding distracting elements with an extension like uBlock or AdGuard.
My final feed consists only of channels/profiles I directly follow. Oh, and there’s also RSS…
I really recommend everyone do the same. It really clears your head.
You walk up to the interface of an infinite digital library. In this library there are an infinite amount of books that you'd like to read, or even contain anything coherent for you to read. The problem is there is also an infinite amount of books you don't want to read, can't read, or aren't even coherent information. And this second infinity is so much bigger than the first infinity that it is infinitely improbable that you will ever pick out a coherent book.
Everything you do in a coherent informational world is directed by sets of biases. Algorithmic recommendations are just another one of the tools used to traverse this infinite world, and if you understand the biases they impart you can use these tools successfully.
...because advertising
I think the mistake you are making is that you believe you can know what decisions and on what basis algorithms on platform apps make for you. Well you cannot. First of all they have again and again been shown to have a hidden agenda’s and besides, they change all the time. In the end it is basically same as letting Zuck or Musk select everything you read.
Instead you can select your own algorithm. It is pretty simple, I did one at age of ten at our local library before I even knew what algorithm was. Only think I knew was that I really liked this book Hobbit by someone named JRR Tolkien.
if i want to read them all, I don't need help choosing. any book is one I want to read!
if I don't want to read them, I already have opinions. I should just pick one that I do want to read.
and I don't have opinions I can just ask someone for a recommendation.
big libraries existed before algorithmic recommendations, and people managed.
a bad habit i noticed after taking hiatus of focused work was me jumping into different windows and tabs and just mindlessly consuming content without finishing them. after noticing this pattern, i decided i will focus on one task at a time and finishing it, like reading the OPs article. it did wonders for me and i noticed i'm now even more focused that ever. the lesson is indeed being aware first, and then practicing the habit.
And on top of that work chat
And now agents, which are basically all designed for you to spin up several different conversation threads and hop between them constantly while the agent works.
It's no wonder people can't focus. Both work and leisure are basically designed to split up your attention into microscopic fragments.
This overlooks how common custom homepages such as Lycos, Yahoo! and MSN were and how the browsers pushed these as their default home pages.
While they may not be as addictive as "the algorithm" of today, they were still packed with clickbait images/links to attract your attention and ads to drain your wallet.
MSN: https://web.archive.org/web/20021108094511/http://www.msn.co...
My MSN: https://web.archive.org/web/20021107081016/http://my.msn.com...
I don't read books as regularly as I should, but I always enjoy when I do. I donate plasma once a month and the 'enforced idle time' is perfect for catching up on an hour of reading.
(I'm not very good at either tennis or skating, especially since I've been doing both for 10-odd years, but I enjoy them, they keep me fit, and I'm slowly improving or at least arresting the natural decline that comes with age, and planning on not giving either of them up until I'm literally physically unable to keep doing them)
You've always had terrible borderline-porn romance novels at grocery stores and terrible pulp novels and the like. We just don't read terrible novels from 100 years ago; whatever we read from that era now has survived the test of time. The same cannot be said about anything released in the last couple years.
Grocery store softcore porn was still very expensive in time, money, and space. The amount of energy required to move a book around is monumental in comparison to how much energy it takes to move the same number of bits of information contained in the book. The speed at which just the information moves (in modern digital networks) is nearly instantaneous. The space the digital book carries is not measurable by the human senses.
It was nearly impossible for most people to afford to fill every waking moment with a book in front of them, bar a few addicts. Now there is a river of information actively fighting for your eyeballs at every moment. And how the meme-gene works, the most addictive types will rise as the victor.
I'm not sure I agree with that. Public libraries have been around for a very long time, certainly well before the internet. People could get all the books they wanted to read for free. During summer vacations when I was in grade school, I would read multiple books per month, sometimes multiple per week, because we lived close to a public library.
The difference between a library and the internet is the difference between obsession and addiction.
It can be that most books were low-effort shit, but that the problem has become even worse with time.
These days I have this vague paranoia that most of what I'm watching, listening to, interacting with is just the product of some meat proxy somewhere trying to put some more half baked crap in front of my eyeballs.
I wish I had a portal to human curated, absolutely non-AI, non-clickbait BS like the very old internet (which still wasn't perfect). I think that dream is effectively dead now. But old books/movies/music are still good. Now I sound like an old grandpa reminiscing about the old days.
Sure, in the 90’s everyone bought John Grisham’s newest thriller which they started and never finished, but at least it kinda had a plot, characters and maybe it tried to even say something (although I might be pushing a bit too far there). It wasn’t good, but at least you read a story, not just barely disguised fanfiction of werewolves having sex.
Or maybe I am just an old man and have no idea what kids are up to. Time for your meds granpa.
They do, and it's annoying that even apps for "real work" do the same thing by flashing notifications/tips in your face, advertising a new feature you don't want to use right now, or warning you that everything is about to break soon.
Achievement unlocked!
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New update available! Please restart the game to download the latest update!
You cannot stay focused all day and theres nothing wrong with "just show me random dumb stuff" i mean i wont lie, im old and RTL2 was a thing you know even in educated circles. These no tv people read bad fiction instead.
And i actually kinda like the youtube algo to wind down - but i can also just switch to a timeshift archive.
I think the problem is more that these platforms are reeeally comfortable to use and its not that easy to have the same - doable though.
Oh and btw if you wanna go back to blog circles and xmpp and vpn lan games im all in but times are changing.
This is also a great line. We all know the previous sentences but the 'sth will click' is not well-known. I experienced it when reading long novels from Trollope (and I have ADHD).
Upon my third 800-page novel, my reading speed quadrupled, and my concentration came back to me.
I used to be a voracious reader and I LOVED books. They were the distraction I used to escape the world, rather than youtube videos. Or I'd pick up my guitar. Or teach myself how to set up an IRC server. I miss the days when I had that kind of attention and desperately wish I could get it back.
You've given me hope that it's possible.
ADHD can worsen if:
1. you avoid sunshine and daily walks in nature. 2. don't sleep early and skip morning exercise and breakfast. 3. watch short videos or even long ones for 'fun'.
After taking care of these three, the next step is to claim your attention back by reading long books. It's not that difficult. As all real ADHDs know, even doing toilet needs dopamine and is hard to do (boring). So I place a book on the ledge beside me, and when I toilet, I just read. I've read four such novels in two months now, and all in the toilet!
I discovered now that I can read anything just as fast and my attention stays and my brain works better. Try it. Trollope is great, but only if you're a overthinker like me. I recommend Lewis's "The Monk" if you're into morality/ethics + adventure, or Lermontov's "A hero of our time" if you want to see poetry in prose, and also learn a lot of street wisdom (the kind we ADHDs usually lack). I read both BTW (see my blog for reviews, link on my HN profile).
And finally, don't ever be discouraged. That mental model is easy to fall into, but there are many mental models! :)
Anyway, these work for me.
Everyone likes to think they're 'immune' to advertisement. That they're somehow mentally above the whole concept and it doesn't affect them at all. Total nonsense.
I know the post mostly already says this, but related, this is also part of the danger of modern social media algorithms. Negative, outrage-inducing topics tend to get more attention in the short run. However, if someone watches it even once, that causes the algorithm to send a more of that kind of content. Before you know it, some people are getting fed and endless stream of the worst possible news, the most depressing takes, over and over. It can aggravate existing mental health issues or give them to people who did not have them before. The algorithm isn't 'designed' to do this, it's just trying to maximize metrics like time spent. It doesn't 'care' if the topics are negative or positive. But they have to be reshaped to consider the damage they can do when you start multiplying that by hundreds of millions of people.
I completely agree, and I wish people talked about this more. Even if you ignore all the manipulative messaging of the advertisements themselves the fact that there are now posters everywhere telling you to buy things, do things, be better than everyone else is corrosive in itself. Nobody is paying for an advert that tells you "you are fine the way you are, you don't need to buy anything, you should go for a nice walk in the park, it's free".
I've thought before about how the west basically abandoned religion and instead now we just get preached at by corporations and advertisements instead. Whether you like the idea of Christianity and religion or not, at least the message of Jesus was "everyone is equally loved, don't try and be superior to others, don't cling to material possessions". Now instead of just getting preached to at church we get preached to all day from all angles, and the message is the complete opposite.
There is now no way to tell if somebody online in a human or a robot. Even video/zoom/voice is no longer a distinguishable.
There could be a technology that cryptographically ensures that each letter/character came from a physical keypress/touch from a human when you want to interact with a human online in written form, but then again a robot could also be pressing the physical switches or interacting with a touchscreen. Perhaps this technology could handle copying/pasting too as long as the text originally came from a human.
I hope we'll develop more robust mechanisms for detecting non-human generated content (including text) that aren't only enforceable by law (e.g. labeling AI-generated content in the EU). Apple Reference Image is one of the steps in this direction.
It's kind of like a human moving to a planet with a nitrogen atmosphere. We have to wear a space suit to survive. No matter how much we slim it down, it's still a system on top of our existing systems.
The internet is the same. We have to put a digital suit on our analog meat to explore a digital world that is becoming crowded with evolving digital natives, and those natives are rapidly becoming smarter and better than us in these spaces.
Sydney and Melbourne are known to have the best coffee in the world on average. Italian immigrants came over and took what the Italians started and perfected it. McDonald's McCafe was conceptualised and started in Melbourne in 1993, because of Melbourne's strong coffee scene. Australia is the only country that Starbucks failed in, because the coffee here is already too good.
Having said all of this, I still think that about 2/3 of coffee being made by baristas in Sydney is undrinkable. If the beans aren't poor quality or stored incorrectly, the barista will use tap water that is too hard or soft, grind the beans on the wrong setting, over or underextract, overheat the milk until it denatures, not wipe out the previous grind from the portafilter (leading to an ugly, bitter flavour), and do many other little things that ruin the coffee.
I can literally walk into most coffee shops and hear the milk frother "screaming" as the proteins are being denatured. This is the coffee snob capital of the world, and most people still drink terrible coffee without giving it a second thought.
The average consumer doesn't have enough knowledge to have good taste. It's tragic. It sucks. We would have a better world if people cared just a tiny bit more about the things they consume. But they don't, because there isn't enough time and energy in their life to dedicate to truly looking into something.
And this is why I think that there will unfortunately be a demand for AI art. I don't want this to be the case. I hate it. I hope you do too. I hope we all demand higher standards from the art, culture, and goods that we consume.
But as long as people drink bad coffee, they'll read AI slop and recommend it to their friends. It's just how it is.
Here in the UK, I've recently driven a few thousand miles on longer, road trip-style holidays. That has meant more time in service stations than I'm used to, and I'm shocked (but actually not surprised) at the low bar for everything... food, drink, hygiene; all at exorbitant prices. That's before we get to the bits that really indulge our chimp-brains like the fruit machines and "special, limited edition, collaboration-with-contemporary-film milkshake/slushy/burger" that are just complete marketing exercises.
I was left wondering why people accept this? Am I just a snob, or are people legitimately fine with this? One argument is that we're all struggling — financially, emotionally, existentially — and just trying to survive and get through the day. Who cares if this coffee is £7, loaded with sugar and fat to contribute to our systemic illnesses and contains only the barest minimum of lowest-quality coffee? _"It's a hit, and it gets me through."_
And I think this answers a lot! There's a line from the last Bond film, where the evil villain utters something like "people want oblivion, they want no choices and then to die when they're not looking". It's extreme (he's a Bond-baddie after all), but I don't think it's inaccurate. We're so accustomed to everything being a bit shit that we've collectively checked out and accept it. It explains why so much that would have once been unthinkable socially/politically/morally is now just "fine". AI replacing us in the workplace but also in our hobbies is just the next in a long line of insults.
Perhaps we need to put the French in charge for a while? Nothing a good revolution couldn't fix, and at least we'll be manning the barricades with a good coffee in hand...
But the problem with this is that someone could write an agent to mimic a human. And if there is a financial incentive to prove that you're not AI, which there always will be, it is inevitable.
I've considered learning to handwrite to write my first drafts like that. But then I could use an AI to generate realistic looking scans of handwriting.
I guess I could physically mail the originals to a third party verifier. That's what it may come down to for creatives.
I’ll also going to declare that doom scrolling-ish working on non-impactful personal projects is as BAD as doom scrolling twitter.
That the person might not like seeing the perfect offer is less important than filling the hole in the economy.
But working on non-impactful personal projects is also not as bad as doomscrolling twitter. Personal projects are a good way to build skill and grow your own confidence. Twitter doesn't build anything of significance.
It's true that it's harder to stay present on addictively designed feeds. But I find it difficult to stay present even visiting traditional websites / classic style forums. We also constantly get distracted reading books. Our minds are estimated to be wandering between 30 and 50% of the time during pretty much any task, even without phones or social media [1].
Presence and intention are skills–they can be trained. Don't expect significant benefits if you switch out addictive internet for classic without also training your attention. This applies for anything of this nature. A few weeks ago I took a weekend without any devices as well as a lot of awareness practicing just during everyday tasks, and one interesting benefit was how it allowed me to take enjoyment from mundane tasks–I stopped thinking of them as things to get done as soon as possible to get back to the computer and started just being.
If you meditate just a few minutes each day, you will start actually noticing yourself getting distracted and then shift to awareness. It feels annoying that you got distracted, but that just means it's working.
The reason to do this is we are much happier when we are present–a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.
I highly recommend Born to Flourish [2] for an introduction to meditation and the science behind it (it's still easy to read).
[1] https://neurosciencenews.com/mind-wandering-focus-25745/
[2] https://annas-archive.gd/md5/0e405c329f33fcb63b4647e386f0ad7...
Please tell me how. I need to really really improve myself here. I used to be very good at being disciplined and focused, but being a parent and manager made me an ad-hoc reactive monkey that is always lagging behind with everything and not delivering on type, which I always did some time ago.
If you're completely new to the idea I suggest the book With Each & Every Breath by Thanassiro Bikkhu. It's a Therevada Buddhist book but the breathing meditation instructions in it can be applied even if you want to ignore the other parts of the book.
The book explains their system and includes meditations. I can send you the audiobook and you can download the epub ebook from that Anna's archive link. Obviously also you can buy a hard copy.
I like the Healthy Minds program app more than other meditation apps because:
It's a curriculum so you aren't just handed a library to randomly choose, there's a set path.
It's completely free with no option to pay other than to donate.
There's a lot of speaker options and I like the speaker.
Someone else liked it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47710358
I'm working on a privacy-focused frontend for the Healthy Minds program because their app is very outdated and has a ton of tracking. You can use it on the web at https://getflourish.org. Completely vibe coded, very much not done, but it has the functionality to at least demo it. The Android app is a lot better but I haven't released it yet. The web version needs a ton of work it was just done in an hour based off the Android app and doesn't even format on desktop.
(Edit: Wording)
This should be said more often. In my psychological counseling sessions, I have many victims of porn state that all they think about is you-know-what.
This is just the illusion of choice. Not only that attention was already being monetized. Digital advertising didn't start with algorithmic feeds.
> Doomscrolling will make you stay longer and click on a few more ads. I've personally never bought something out of a Google ad. Tbh how much of their effort they're putting into ads, I don't see much interesting ads. If they would try to sell me some tech/hacky stuff, hell yeah. But random ads, nah thanks.
It blocks all distracting apps. To unblock, I need to choose # of minutes upfront, then pause and put my phone face down for sometime. And then, it unblocks the app for the time I requested, and blocks it again.
Yes. And--change your thoughts, change your life: https://thinkhuman.com/change-your-thoughts-change-your-life...
Well actually HN recommended it to me...
To be honest it is worse than this. Spotify over the years just seems to have gotten worse and worse at the one job I want it to do well which is just play the music I already know I want to play, which should be incredibly obvious from my play count and what I've downloaded.
Instead I'm regularly surprised by random noise such as popover in-product ads for extra features I don't care about, and simple AI features I might want like detecting I am in this certain place at this certain time where I usually listen to these albums or playlists so maybe weight them accordingly in a quick access list on the home screen or something aren't, for whatever reason, done.
I mean this doesn't even need LLMs it's just an algorithm, but you see what I mean. Using intelligence in the ways I should obviously care about from the way I use the product, instead of trying to get me to change the way I use it (I won't, I wish there was a way I could just definitively tell them this).
Alas, after years of annoyance with this it's still just about above the bar of useful enough, so I keep paying, and just can't be bothered to invest the time switching to some other service like apple music. So in a sense I'm probably encouraging this behaviour by not churning.
My biggest complaint re Spotify was poor shuffling, hearing the same song over and over. Finally resolved by using Spotipy to regularly re-order big playlists, and just disable shuffle.
The physical world around you is also sculpted by your actions. You "feel at home" while at home only because you have adjusted it to become your mould. You become an integral piece in your world, making you a piece in jigsaw puzzle which won't be complete without you.
Your bookshelf, for example, is moulded around your interests. Your wine cellar has your favorite wines. Your clothes just fit your fashion. That's your world. When you visit internet, it presents your own world. It reflects an awareness about you, just like your wardrobe does.
In wardrobe case, you intentionally made your choices. In the internet case, you intentionally expressed your interest by your implicit interactions that were enough to be translated into your selections.
Nothing spooky.
Also - in your home, it's YOU that's rejigging things. A result of your intent, your actions. Not curated and delivered to you via some corporate monster with a variety of incentives that are directly at odds with yours.
Intent is not a black and white thing. People sometimes read your intentions via your body language. Same goes with internet. You did express your intent in some way.
You said "The physical world around you is also sculpted by your actions" ... I mentioned many ways in which that's not true. And you now mention the internet is also not completely controlled by one's mind.
That's true ... and ???
Had to get to the end of the article to find the liberal brainrot.
[Pre-Chorus] "We're not going to make it," he explained how the end will come "You and me were never meant to be part of the future"
[Chorus] All we have is now All we've ever had is now All we have is now All we'll ever have is now
[Verse 2] I noticed that he had a watch and hat that looked familiar He was me, from a dimension torn free of the future
[Pre-Chorus] "We're not going to make it," he explained how the end will come "You and me were never meant to be part of the future"
[Chorus] All we have is now All we've ever had is now All we have is now All we'll ever have is now
Flaming Lips - All We Have Is Now
[1] https://www.perlego.com/book/1536286/the-ecology-of-attentio...
The browser extension LinkOff makes the feed much more bearable, even useful. [1]
Also, though I dislike the posts that LI pushes into my feed, I've never gotten the sense that this was motivated by a desire to boost Microsoft's investments. Perhaps I just wasn't paying attention, or am not cynical enough?
1: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/linkoff-filter-and-...
* adblocking is simple both in browser and on the dns level,
* revanced youtube allows you to even skip sponsored segments, regular ads don't deserve a mention, you will see none,
* reddit hasn't been good in forever, it's why we're here,
somehow Twitter/Spotify/YouTube/TikTok algos work just fine for me with this one simple trick: I watch the good stuff, and skip/block/mute the not-so-good stuff. This works less well on LinkedIn but it's a Microsoft product, what did you expect, really.
If you're like me, ie. on Hacker News daily, the modern Internet is a never ending series of wonders with virtually none of the inconvenience. And if on some absolute edge, you must use a website that sucks, both Claude and ChatGPT can drive a browser nowadays.
There was an Australian TV series named The Gruen Transfer on the topic of advertising, which had some really insightful commentary, humour, as well as a regular advertising-insider guy who gave great insights 'from the inside' but was inherently grossly dislikeable in most of the things that he big-upped.
as a side note I was experimenting with the mental health implications of whatever you focus on as creating whatever emotions you experience, to some extent
If you're doing the laundry, notice how the clothes feel in your hands.
If you're walking, notice your breath, notice how your feet and legs feel walking on the ground.
For consumer digital products, the only business model that seems to work is advertising, because consumers are cheap and refuse to pay money for software. But the result is that they instead trade something far more valuable for the software, which is their attention.
The products that get built, as a result, are supremely well-engineered to attract and retain attention, to the detriment of their users. Most of the "news" that reaches us these days is not at all an attempt to actually educate us about the state of the world. Instead its just a collection of inflammatory and enraging facts that are chosen to optimize for engagement (to hold your attention)
In theory, someone could rebuild an ecosystem where people stopped squandering their attention and monetized it with money, but this would require consumers to stop chronically undervaluing their time and overvaluing their money.
Which is kind of scary where you realise people spend hours and hours each day watching youtube slop, tiktok, instagram reels, while also subconsciously feeling "this content is worthless and I wouldn't pay $10 a month to keep watching it".
I'm always fascinated when people claim YouTube pushes content like this. It's an extremely common take, but I don't think it's true.
My experience has been that if I stop clicking something, the algorithm soon stops recommending it. It occasionally brings back a blast from the past--e.g. I watched a sumo competition once, and once in a blue moon it recommends another. But you can downvote bad recommendations, and I simply don't get recommendations for ideas I've never engaged with before.
FWIW I'm not saying the algorithm is great. My feed is absolutely worthless right now, but it's all goofy Japanese content because one of my kids is extremely into that right now. There's zero political content because she isn't showing any interest in it. Heck, most of the stuff isn't even in English anymore.
And hide "Shorts" entirely. They will reappear after a few weeks, but you can hide them again.
Especially on YouTube that can spiral you on a rabbit hole, it can become a very powerful learning force. I have quite a few friends that became experts in niche subjects by rabbit holing themselves on these topics on YouTube, for example, a serigraphist, a carpenter on Japanese carpenting art or a ceramist.
I think the issue already existed for those who had access to the largest libraries and book stores, only Internet reduced friction, increased span of topics and added video.
Since Da Vinci, it is not possible anymore to have all the knowledge in your mind so focus and attention is the main super power.
People use these algorithms because they love them, and yeah someone posting once every 1 or 2 month is not going to make it in these days and ages. I don’t think the internet became worst, it just adapted to other needs.
> Do you want to listen to music? Just open a Spotify playlist and let the algorithm figure out what you like. Please ignore the AI slop they will insert in between real songs to avoid paying royalties to real artists.
To be honest, my Spotify recommendation algorithm complaint is about the exact opposite, that it’s too conservative in what it suggests. Sometimes I feel stuck in a musical “echo chamber.”
I hear from this post that recommendation algorithms are too broad, but it seems from policymakers the bigger complaint is again the opposite (“echo chambers” and “rabbit holes.”) Not sure which is more compelling, but they are surely not entirely orthogonal features.
now that we have cheap spam filtering, why don't we go back to forums
Spam was just a very small part of why people left forums. Size of the community and network effects was one of them. A constant stream of activity on any subject you wanted was yet another. Not having to log in to 40 different places yet another.
Yes, but you don’t have to subscribe to what it suggests. I keep a carefully curated list of subscriptions and very rarely look at recommendations. That gives me a high-quality filter without all the algorithmic BS.
turn off view history, so you don't see 100 toilet videos after watching a video on japanese toilets.
aggressively click "Don't show me this" in its video suggestions, whenever it strays towards politics or similar bait.
despite the inundation of slop, rage bait, and brain rot, youtube still has a goldmine of good content if you can defend yourself from the rest.
this might be the correlation causation fallacy, but it seems to me that combining micro-pieces of reality though a continual stream might actually have net positives on information.
They seem or they are? In many places, statistically, they're actually NOT smarter. It's the other way around.
https://cepr.harvard.edu/news/2026/05/why-us-test-scores-are... https://time.com/article/2026/05/16/student-test-scores-read...
still though - newer generations must get smarter because the cumulative knowledge of society increases with time.
to your articles, i don't know if test scores on reading and math are necessarily good measures of intellect
again today on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49857442
It seems that as digital technology advances, analog experiences become increasingly necessary and valuable.
How could you write 600 words on the topic and not mention the paper otherwise?